This story was originally published by Public News Service.
By Eric Tegethoff, producer
Public News Service
February 26, 2025
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ties with a controversial church based in Idaho and critics said the church’s Christian nationalist views could guide his role in the Trump administration.
Hegseth is part of a church in Tennessee associated with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, founded by Doug Wilson in Moscow, Idaho, in the 1970s. The church holds extreme beliefs, including that the United States should follow biblical law.
Julie Ingersoll, professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida, has studied Christian Reconstructionists like Wilson. She said Hegseth’s church is not like a megachurch in which you walk in and think of yourself as a member.
“That’s just not how this kind of a church system works,” Ingersoll explained. “In order to join, you have to attest to believing the same things and in order to remain a member you have to continue to believe those things.”
Ingersoll added membership is strict and if people’s beliefs change, they can be brought before the church courts on heresy charges.Wilson began his movement in part because he found a lack of sufficient Christian school options for his daughter. Hegseth has expressed similar views for his children.
The Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches has congregations in almost every state and holds other extreme views,such as criminalization of people in the LGBTQ+ community. The yare also deeply patriarchal, which Ingersoll noted is a label the church itself uses, with some arguing women should not have the right to vote.
Ingersoll pointed out Hegseth backtracked during his confirmation hearing on whether women should serve in the military.
“He kind of switched it in a soft way to not believing that women should be in combat,” Ingersoll recounted. “That gives a flexibility to allow people to hear what he’s saying and go, ‘Oh, yeah. Maybe that’s not a terrible thing.'”
In 2020, Hegseth published a book which mischaracterized the Islamic faith and positioned Muslims as historic enemies of the West.Ingersoll stressed the belief also flows from the church to which he belongs.
“For him, Islam and all other world religions and all other ideological systems, all isms, flow out of original sin in the Garden of Eden because they’re all based in this idea that humans can reason apart from God,” Ingersoll explained.
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